Filling the gap: Art on the Tube
Isabel Andrews, Thursday, 19th June 2008
A quietly pleasing intervention occurred on my journey to work this morning, courtesy of London Transport’s Art on the Underground scheme that has commissioned new works by Anna Barriball, on display this week around the tube network. For nestled among the array of glossy but uninspiring adverts for Magnum ice cream and the latest crime novel, is Barriball’s series of posters, wryly entitled – given the context – About 60 miles of beautiful views.
The posters consist of short phrases found by the artist on the back of photographs in a discarded album in a junk shop, presented in stark black and white in London Underground’s classic New Johnston font. The rescued sentences: Off to work 8.15 Am. (Nylon uniform) and Looking back the way we had come, for example, are given a status and prominence through their typographic treatment. They immediately elicit a combination of gentle reaction and curiosity about the people and absent images to which the words originally belonged. I couldn’t help a smile at the starchy discomfort of the nylon uniform and I imagined the views in the photograph as rolling hills of summer countryside – an antidote to the darkened corridors filled with a stream of jaded commuters. It’s a brilliant piece of psychogeography of which Guy Debord would have been proud. So applause to London Underground for these moments of respite - and all the for price of an Oyster card.
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